Archive for January, 2014

You may think of Snake Road as the ridge road that climbs the crest between Thornhill and Shepherd canyons, but it’s really Colton Boulevard. For a quiet hike above Montclair with views, you want Colton. Its lower part runs north of Snake across ground underlain by the Redwood Canyon Formation. Here’s a roadside outcrop.

I didn’t even notice the parallel fractures until I opened the photo at home. They probably represent a bit of extra cementation, thanks to a late pulse of fluids, but they may also be original bedding.

I mentioned views. If you loop around Mendoza and Mazuela Drives you can view some immaculate houses and grounds, but I like the big empty lot on Mazuela that overlooks Pinehaven canyon; click it for the bigger version.

The Lincoln Square shopping center is a little neighborhood-scale set of shops on Redwood Road next to Route 13. It’s not very natural but it has some interesting natural features. Here’s the topography in Google Maps.

The graded area sits across the small valley of uppermost Lion Creek, running due south from top center. (A second branch of Lion Creek is to the west cutting through Holy Names University.) Its east edge is a cut into the hillside, exposing a bunch of serpentine rock. It’s the little strip of purple on the geologic map of the same area.

You can see the rock next to the parking lot . . .

. . . and in more detail behind the Safeway and the other building full of shops. This exposure is quite spectacular, but I was just doing a reconnaissance and didn’t linger.

I was actually visiting here to look for signs of the aboriginal hematite workings. This is where the local tribes came to dig Oakland ochre. This is as close as I got to that, a boulder rich in iron oxides along the north driveway entrance.

I have only the most preliminary ideas about this area. The map classifies this area as Franciscan sandstone, and this boulder doesn’t contradict that. There are other brief nods to the original landscape studding the parking lot, but on whole it’s pretty sorry-looking.

My idea is that in this part of the world the development of ochre requires serpentinite and a suitable host rock for the oxides to grow, and that the process happens underground at the base of the soil. It takes careful excavation by nature to reveal this fragile material without washing it away, and Lion Creek and the Hayward fault (on the left edge of the map) combined to do that here.